When Bernie Sanders famously said: “Enough of those damned emails,” many thought they’d heard the death-knell of that wearisome argument. Just this week, President Obama referred to it as “all that noise,” designed to confuse new voters about Hillary’s trustworthiness. The concept of “noise” comes from cybernetics and it refers to anything that interferes with a message sent by one party to another–we laymen also know it as static. Sad to say, we are all familiar with static on our cell phones which keep us from hearing the other person’s words and messages. The static in this case, as we all know by now, are the dark references to some of Hillary’s emails. Of the emails, President Obama also noted that while Clinton, while serving as his Secretary of State, made an “honest mistake” by using a private email server, as it was now “being blown up into just some crazy thing,” which will affect new voters when they hear “all that noise.” Why now, you may ask, all of this focused static. Well,...

Trump’s post-convention 6 point bounce was wiped clean as Hillary emerged from the Democratic Convention with a 6 to 9 point lead, according to most polls. One reason was the well produced program that the Demos put on. Part of it was due to Trump’s own continued poor judgment, his foot-in-mouthitis as he chose to denigrate a gold star mother who son, Capt. Humayun Khan, heroically gave his life in Afghanistan saving others during a suicide bombing. As usual Donald was his own worst enemy. Not only did Trump, who never served in our military himself, insult Mrs Khan and her religion, but he doubled down the next day, expanding his attacks on the Khans. This quickly drew the vocal ire of most mainstream Republicans and veterans throughout the country. The Veterans of Foreign Wars joined in the condemnation of Trump, as they, too, wondered about whether such a man could be qualified to be Commander-in-Chief. As if that wasn’t enough, Trump took on fellow Republicans Sen. John McCain and Speaker Paul...

Seventy years of bi-partisanship have gone into creating a credible deterrence strategy to cope with the challenges posed to our foreign policy in an era of nuclear powers and the means of delivering them. Our deterrence strategy rests upon the elimination and reduction of doubt as to whether certain actions against ourselves and our allies will produce a response by the U.S. that is unacceptable to a potential enemy. The weaving of alliances and other measures taken to implement and maintain this strategy has been supported by every President, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, both Republican and Democratic, since the fateful dropping of those early atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War II and ushered in the dangerous nuclear age. This credibility of our response and commitments to our allies have been seriously, if not fatally, weakened by Donald Trump’s clearly ignorant insertion of doubt into the equation. He might as well have invited North Korea across the “no-man’s land” and across the 38th parallel and on into our...

The attacks in Paris have the potential to be game changers. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls exclaimed, “nous sommes en guerre” (we are at war), and President Hollande told the world that “France will destroy IS.” President Obama announced that the U.S. stands together with France, and Secretary of State John Kerry announced meetings with his French counterpart to determine exactly what form the response will take. Talks of war are in the air, and it has been seized upon by many of the Republican hopefuls, and some Democrats have lent their voice to the jingoist chants. Whichever path of response that we choose, we would do well to make sure that we don’t repeat the disastrous invade-first and think-about-what-happens-next-later mode that produced the Iraqi mess and the resultant ISIS conundrum. ISIS has been successful in recruiting Western Muslims, in part, by framing it as a war between Islam and Christian Crusaders–a reminder of the humiliation, plundering, and rape that accompanied the Crusader’s conquering march to the holy land. Meanwhile, candidate Donald Trump, whose ten hour...

This past week’s polls show some serious Donald Trump slippage. A deeper look into the polls suggests that his problems go well beyond losing the lead to Dr. Ben Carson in Iowa and Wisconsin. In today’s post we will show why his campaign is in real trouble. For the Democrats events of the week suggest a big Hillary win. Now for the details. Polls, released Thursday and Friday, indicate that Dr. Ben Carson has surged ahead of Donald Trump in Iowa. Monday, the Monmouth poll showed that surge continues. A Wisconsin poll also shows Dr. Carson moving into the lead there. Trump’s spectacular, and unconventional campaign, until now, had resulted in him taking a sizable lead in both state and national polls. There were, however, clear warning signs that his campaign had hit a wall–at a polling level well below the majority needed for nomination. We’ll look into what these signs were, but first note the reasons so many political pundits had expected his campaign to implode. This will provide the background for the data...

Donald Trump’s argument that it doesn’t matter whether he knows even the most rudimentary information about the Mideast because once elected President he’d spend twenty-four hours brushing up and that, he told us was enough to make him the best foreign policy president ever is, on the one hand, amusing in its own way because it shows him to be an egotistical buffoon. On the other hand, it was frightening, when he elaborated on his foreign policy strategy by saying that he’ll simply go and find a Douglas MacArthur to fix the problem of ISIS. This awful suggestion demands a closer examination. It it is worth noting that even hawkish conservatives, who might otherwise welcome a MacArthur or a Patton or a Westmoreland running our Mideast involvement, recognize essential nature of Donald Trump and his bombastic “Trumpism’s.” Writing for the very conservative National Review last week, Jonah Goldberg said of Trump: “He’s a mouth at the wrong end of an alimentary canal spewing crap with no sense of responsibility.” Now in case any of you don’t recognize Patton, Westmoreland, and MacArthur, they were former war...